Eric Kee

Digital Image Authentication From JPEG Headers

It is often desirable to determine if an image has been modified in any way from its original recording. The JPEG format affords engineers many implementation trade-offs which give rise to widely varying JPEG headers. We exploit these variations for image authentication. A camera signature is extracted from a JPEG image consisting of information about quantization tables, Huffman codes, thumbnails, and exchangeable image file format (EXIF). We show that this signature is highly distinct across 1.3 million images spanning 773 different cameras and cell phones. Specifically, 62% of images have a signature that is unique to a single camera, 80% of images have a signature that is shared by three or fewer cameras, and 99% of images have a signature that is unique to a single manufacturer. The signature of Adobe Photoshop is also shown to be unique relative to all 773 cameras. These signatures are simple to extract and offer an efficient method to establish the authenticity of a digital image.

Exposing digital forgeries from 3-D lighting environments

When creating a photographic composite, it can be difficult to match lighting conditions. We describe a technique for measuring lighting conditions in an image, and describe its use in detecting photographic composites. Specifically, we describe how to approximate a 3-D lighting environment with a low-dimensional model and how to estimate the models parameters from a single image. Inconsistencies in the lighting model are then used as evidence of tampering.

Modeling and removing spatially-varying optical blur

Photo deblurring has been a major research topic in the past few years. So far, existing methods have focused on removing the blur due to camera shake and object motion. In this paper, we show that the optical system of the camera also generates significant blur, even with professional lenses. We introduce a method to estimate the blur kernel densely over the image and across multiple aperture and zoom settings. Our measures show that the blur kernel can have a non-negligible spread, even with top-of-the-line equipment, and that it varies nontrivially over this domain. In particular, the spatial variations are not radially symmetric and not even left-right symmetric. We develop and compare two models of the optical blur, each of them having its own advantages. We show that our models predict accurate blur kernels that can be used to restore photos. We demonstrate that we can produce images that are more uniformly sharp unlike those produced with spatially-invariant deblurring techniques.

Exposing photo manipulation with inconsistent shadows

We describe a geometric technique to detect physically inconsistent arrangements of shadows in an image. This technique combines multiple constraints from cast and attached shadows to constrain the projected location of a point light source. The consistency of the shadows is posed as a linear programming problem. A feasible solution indicates that the collection of shadows is physically plausible, while a failure to find a solution provides evidence of photo tampering.

Exposing Photo Manipulation from Shading and Shadows

We describe a method for detecting physical inconsistencies in lighting from the shading and shadows in an image. This method imposes a multitude of shading- and shadow-based constraints on the projected location of a distant point light source. The consistency of a collection of such constraints is posed as a linear programming problem. A feasible solution indicates that the combination of shading and shadows is physically consistent, while a failure to find a solution provides evidence of photo tampering.

Digital image authentication from thumbnails

We describe how to exploit the formation and storage of an embedded image thumbnail for image authentication. The creation of a thumbnail is modeled with a series of filtering operations, contrast adjustment, and compression. We automatically estimate these model parameters and show that these parameters differ significantly between camera manufacturers and photo-editing software. We also describe how this signature can be combined with encoding information from the underlying full resolution image to further refine the signatures distinctiveness.

Printer profiling for forensics and ballistics

We describe a technique for authenticating printed and scanned text documents. This technique works by modeling the degradation in a document caused by printing. The resulting printer profile is then used to detect inconsistencies across a document, and for ballistic purposes - that of linking a document to a printer.

A perceptual metric for photo retouching

In recent years, advertisers and magazine editors have been widely criticized for taking digital photo retouching to an extreme. Impossibly thin, tall, and wrinkle- and blemish-free models are routinely splashed onto billboards, advertisements, and magazine covers. The ubiquity of these unrealistic and highly idealized images has been linked to eating disorders and body image dissatisfaction in men, women, and children. In response, several countries have considered legislating the labeling of retouched photos. We describe a quantitative and perceptually meaningful metric of photo retouching. Photographs are rated on the degree to which they have been digitally altered by explicitly modeling and estimating geometric and photometric changes. This metric correlates well with perceptual judgments of photo retouching and can be used to objectively judge by how much a retouched photo has strayed from reality.

Exposing photo manipulation from user-guided 3D lighting analysis

We describe a photo forensic technique based on detecting inconsistencies in lighting. This technique explicitly measures the 3-D lighting properties for individual people, objects, or surfaces in a single image. We show that with minimal training, an analyst can accurately specify 3-D shape in a single image from which 3-D lighting can be automatically estimated. A perturbation analysis on the estimated lighting is performed to yield a probabilistic measure of the location of the illuminating light. Inconsistencies in lighting within an image evidence photo tampering.